Open XML links for 04-17-2008

Like a few other people, I've been taking a break from blogging since the Open XML vote was final, to deal with an overflowing email inbox and a few other things. Here are some posts that I've found interesting in the last couple of weeks:

SC34 plenary. The semi-annual SC34 meeting took place in Oslo last week, and it sounds like good progress was made on setting up the plans for future maintenance of IS29500. Brian Jones has an overview of what took place in the meeting, Alex Brown describes his role in SC34's plans to define IS29500 maintenance procedures, and Rick Jelliffe provides some great perspective from the other side of the planet.

Texas hearing on document formats. The Texas House of Representatives revisited last week the question of whether to mandate the use of ODF. Jason Matusow takes a look at the issues and concludes "I do hope that these studies take a long-look at what really matters, where the value is, and how interoperability will work in a multi-format world. The single format argument is a red herring argument." Andy Updegrove, who spoke at the session, has a different perspective: "the battle over document formats will continue to be waged at every level, in every statehouse and other political venue around the world for some time to come."

FAQs on ISO/IEC 29500. ISO has published answers to frequently asked questions about the ISO/IEC 29500 (Office Open XML) standards process.

Digging into the details. Jesper Lund Stocholm takes a close look at how embedded objects work in Office and Open XML (and contrasts some of the details with OpenOffice and ODF).

KML. Rick Jelliffe explains Google's KML standard and how it connects two other standards as a potential model for harmonization of document formats.

OpenXML4J. Julien Chable anounces a beta release.

Reusing Excel business logic. Maarten Balliauw covers how to use the PHPExcel library to build a web interface to business rules stored in a spreadsheet. (Hey Maarten, I think you're in that overflowing inbox ... I better get back to it. :-))